Electronic documents can often only be viewed as images, and access to the underlying raw text is either difficult or infeasible. One example is reading books from digital libraries. Another example is viewing a digital presentation made using a document camera or a similar presentation system.
Further, these text-containing document images are often viewed on small screens (like screens of PDAs, mobile phones, and so on) or on shared displays (like on a projector screen in a classroom setting). This viewing can entail having to zoom into the image to make the text large enough to be readable. Zooming into blocks of text in a document image spreads the text equally in all directions and could result in the text boundaries expanding beyond the viewable area of the screen. The user would then have to use interactions like scrolling and panning to read the text.
Automated reflow of text in document images can greatly enhance the readability of such text when viewed on small screens or on shared displays, and is typically preferred by users over navigating horizontal pan/scroll interfaces. Text reflow allows users to enlarge text in a way that whenever the line width of the text exceeds the width of the screen, the text gets “wrapped around”, i.e., for each line, the trailing word or words on that line are moved to the beginning of the succeeding line.